“For the Church, charity is not a kind of welfare activity which could equally well be left to others, but is a part of her nature, an indispensable expression of her very being.”
From Deus Caritas Est, Part II, Paragraph 25
Something to think about … How does our sharing express our love?
I thank you, my God for having in a thousand
different ways led my eyes to discover the immense
simplicity of things. Little by little, through the irresistible
development of those yearnings you implanted in me
as a child, through the influence of gifted friends
who entered my life at certain moments to bring light
and strength to my mind, and through the awakenings
of spirit I owe to successive initiations, gentle and terrible,
which you cause me to undergo, through all these
I have been brought to the point where I can no longer see
anything, nor any longer breathe, outside the milieu
in which all is made one.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, S.J.
[Editor's note: Sometimes comments get buried or overlooked. Kathy and I did not want you to miss this reflection on our quote from Thomas Merton from cousin, friend, coach, and eighth grade teacher Andrew Vasquez.]
Thanks Kathy for that beautiful quote! This is my second visit to the site. I am enjoying the thoughtful, insightful writing. I wanted to weigh in earlier, but I was short of time (Surprise, surprise!) Besides, the only thing I’ve really wanted to talk or write about is my daughter’s soccer team, which I just happen to coach. Did I mention that we are undefeated? So, how does this fit into a discussion on cultivating a grateful heart? Suffice it to say that I am grateful to have the opportunity to coach, moreover, coach my daughters! I’m grateful that they show me lots of grace and mercy as I rant and rave on the sidelines, still kidding myself that they are actually listening and willing to respond to me in the heat of “battle.” I could go on and on…
What I really wanted to say was that I have found that when I awake in the morning with a “Good morning, I love you, God Bless you Jesus” on my lips and then actively open my eyes, ears and mind to the manifold blessings He is bestowing on me, even just between the place I brush my teeth to when I get to my classroom and face that first wave of 8th graders, I am not only overwhelmed with thankfulness but I just plain enjoy my day more. The day is full and productive, leaving a lingering feeling of completeness and an anticipation of what tomorrow holds. Now, if I could just string a few more of THOSE days together. It all begins with a simple prayer, yet how easy it is to forget, and neglect that first simple acknowledgement of Him. “Good morning, God Bless, I love you!” It is a simple phrase with great power. It works good with grouchy people we share our homes with too!
October 11 is the feast day of Blessed Pope John XXIII (1881-1965). The son of Italian share croppers who worked in the fields with his brothers and served as a stretcher bearer in World War I, he became a Church diplomat, Cardinal Archbishop of Venice, and Pope. This might seem like enough for more than one lifetime. Yet Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli would launch an institutional and cultural revolution unprecedented in Church history. By convening the Second Vatican Council (1961 -1965) and calling for “aggiornamento,” a renewal and updating of the Catholic Church, Angelo Roncalli opened the door to the Post Modern Church. Although he did not live to convene the second session of the Council, it is hard to appreciate the depth of the change Pope John XXIII and his successor Pope Paul VI brought about.
It is not enough to say that the Mass changed from Latin to the everyday languages of the faithful, because the change in the liturgy only symbolized a much deeper change of mentality. Christ is present among His people in their signs and symbols, in their language. “The Church” referred not only to the leadership of the Pope and bishops, but to its body - the faithful. We now use the term “faith community” somewhat lightly, without realizing the complete change of thinking the term represents.
Pope John Paul II, who declared Pope John XXIII Blessed, represented a completely different mentality. The difference is aptly summarized by Tom Fox in the National Catholic Reporter.
“How seemingly different is the mood among the hierarchy in Rome today. If images speak, then in place of the smiling John XXIII, we see a pained John Paul II, his face grimaced, his tired body leaning on his crosier, carrying the world’s burdens on his shoulders. Pope John gave us Pacem in Terris, a map to worldwide human understanding. Pope John Paul II gives us an analysis of the “culture of death,” an acknowledgment of global human failure.
This is not to say John did not understand the cross or John Paul the resurrection. It is to say their views of how grace operates in the world are radically different. John saw the church as an instrument of cooperative acts. John Paul sees the church as a fortress tested by evil. John saw the world, the playground of God’s love, as primary. John Paul sees the church, instrument of salvation, as primary. Operating out of John’s vision, the church not only can but also must adapt. It changes because the world changes. Operating out of John Paul’s vision, the church must strengthen itself by purification. It must not adapt because to do so is to blur the sign of contradiction.”…
“The late NCR Vatican Affairs Writer Peter Hebblethewaite once said the deeper underlying problem with John Paul’s black and white assessment is not that the world is so black but it makes the church so white. So unrepentive. So resisting of change. The perfect instrument of God requires no change. Further, it must not change.”
- Tom Fox - Analysis - Second Special Synod for Europe, October 1999.
Blessed Pope John XXIII, pray for us.
“Every breath we draw is a gift of God’s love,
every moment of existence is a grace, for it brings
with it immense graces from God. Gratitude
therefore takes nothing for granted, is never
unresponsive, is constantly awakening to new wonder
and to praise of the goodness of God. For the grateful
person knows that God is good, not by hearsay but by
experience. And that is what makes all the difference.”
Thomas Merton in Thoughts in Solitude
October 5 is the feast day of St. Maria Faustina Kowalska (1905 - 1938) whose brief life and spiritual journal inspired The Divine Mercy Movement in the Catholic Church. She was baptized Helen Kowalska and came from a small village Glogowiecz near Lodz, Poland. She was the third of ten children and had only 3 years of formal education. At 14 she began working in well to do house holds as a governess. (Given her limited education she was probably more of a domestic servant.) Helen Kowalska was known as a pleasant, cheerful, and talkative young woman. When she was almost 20 she entered the Congregation of the Sisters of Mercy in Cracow as a lay sister on August 1, 1925. She worked mainly in the kitchen and the garden. She pronounced her first vows on April 30, 1926 and became Sr. Mary Faustina of the Most Blessed Sacrament.
In the convent she was pleasant, cheerful, and obedient according to her fellow sisters. She was pleasantly unremarkable until the evening of February 22, 1931 when she had her first vision of Christ, as the King of Mercy. In the years that followed she received her call to be an apostle and secretary of Christ in promoting an awareness of the Divine Mercy and living a life a life of mercy. It was not smooth sailing by any means. She was honest with her spiritual directors and confessors but no one could reassure her that the visions were really legitimate. Her fellow sisters generally viewed her experience with a high degree of skepticism. St. Faustina kept her pleasant disposition and continued to carry out all of her tasks with industry. Nevertheless, she became a social outcast and her life became miserable. Understandably, she identified with Christ in His Passion.
Relief came in 1933 after St. Faustina professed her perpetual vows. Her spiritual advisors helped her to have confidence in the visions and her relationship with Christ. When the first painting of her vision was completed she was disappointed that it conveyed very little of the great beauty of her vision. The painting was first publicly displayed in 1935 in Vilnius which was in Poland at the time and is now the capital of Lithuania. The devotion really took off with outbreak of World War II in 1939 a year after St. Faustina’s death and grew steadily for the next 20 years. The Holy See banned the devotion in 1959 due to wording in translations of devotional material. Carol Wojtyla the Archbishop of Cracow worked unceasingly for 20 years to get the ban lifted. He succeeded six months before he was elected Pope John Paul II.
In a way it not surprising that Pope John Paul II the first Polish pope, would have been inspired by her as young man. In fact John Paul II canonized (declared her a saint) St. Faustina in 2000 as the first saint of the new millenium and as a model for Christians in the third millenium. The pope also designated the second Sunday after Easter as Divine Mercy Sunday for the entire church. The day the Pope made these pronouncements, he said that it was the happiest day of his life. John Paul II would later die on the eve of Divine Mercy Sunday in 2005.
What is surprising is that such a devotion, which focuses on helping others in physical and spiritual need, would become so strong in Poland at a time when it was about to be ripped asunder by Hitler and Stalin and would reappear in a different shape and location behind the Iron Curtain as a Communist country.
Unlike many devotional movements in the Catholic Church which focus on the individual’s relationship with Christ, the Divine Mercy movement emphasizes a ministry of service to others and society. Christians are called to be the compassion of God here and now. The movement focuses on the spiritual and corporal works of mercy as outlined in Matthew 25: 35-46. ( For a list of the Works of Mercy, please scroll down to the bottom of this link in American Catholic.)
Like many Catholic devotional movements, there is an emphasis on a particular image of Christ, there is a chaplet of prayers, and a novena. Divine Mercy Sunday is now becoming a day of special devotional observance in churches which enshrine the image. The challenge for Catholic culture will be to meet the discomfort and privation of the following of Christ as promoted and lived by St. Faustina Kowalska and Pope John Paul II. If the Divine Mercy becomes yet another icon of personal comfort we will have found yet another way to say no to Christ politely.
October 4 is the feast of St. Francis of Assisi (1182-1226). I once heard a priest ( a non-Franciscan) say that St. Francis was one of the great religious figures of all time. Francis left a life of privilege and comfort to adopt a radical Christian lifestyle of poverty and service to the poor. Francis became the reluctant head of a major religious movement of men and women. Today he is revered by Christians and non-Christians around the world as a model of peace, humility, and compassion.
Francis was one of seven children and he was baptized Giovanni di Bernadone. His parents were Pietro di Bernardone and Pica Bourlemont. His father called him Francesco - an apparent reference to his mother’s French heritage. Francis’ father was a successful cloth merchant and Francis had the benefit of a good education. He ran with a group of young well-to-do friends who spent their time drinking, partying, and chasing women. From time to time his charity got the better of him, and his friends - as well as his father - mocked him for his foolishness in giving to the needy.
The story of his conversion is a gradual one involving a year in Perugia as a prisoner of war, illness, and a constant sense of calling. Franco Zefirelli’s film biography of St. Francis, “Brother Son, Sister Moon” (1973), presents a young idealistic, impractical man. To many, Zefirelli’s St. Francis was a hippie. As “mature” (read “jaded”) sophisticates, it is easy to be condescending to St. Francis as portrayed by his biographers and the facts of his actual life. However, if we dismiss St. Francis as a gentle fool, we do so to his model - Christ.
The early impact of St. Francis on the Church was to renew personal devotion to Christ as the Incarnate Word dwelling with us. He invented the “creche,” or nativity scene, as an opportunity and aid to contemplation of the human birth of God in poverty to the powerless of the world. Service to the outcast - lepers, the homeless, the mentally ill, the destitute - became service to Christ in our midst. The presence of God in His creation and all life forms, is a hallmark of his spirituality. St. Francis’ tangible sense of God would continue to ripple down the centuries, not only through members of the Franciscan family - St. Bonaventure and John Duns Scotus - but also St. Dominic, St, Thomas Aquinas, St. Ignatius Loyola, and St. Vincent de Paul. The work of Franciscan Fr. Richard Rohr is a good example of the spirituality of St. Francis today. The life and example of St. Francis permeates western Christianity - both Catholic and Protestant - in such a way that it is difficult to conceive of Christianity without him.
Today, St. Francis is important to people around the world facing issues of hunger, nuclear war, and environmental collapse. Every year in September in Assisi, the United Nations holds a peace conference and Pope John Paul II led inter-faith peace services on more than one occasion. St. Francis continues to challenge those who are religious and mystical to encounter the living God in the messiness of everyday life and problems which seem completely beyond our control.
October 2 is the feast of the Guardian Angels. Spirit messengers and agents of the Divine are found in many world religions that predate Christianity. Angels are also a big part of New Age spirituality.
Spirithome.com’s article on Why Angels? does a good job of reviewing traditional Christian views of angels and their place in the lives of Christians. (The site is an excellent information and inspiration resource. Be sure to check it out.)
If you want to review the traditional Catholic teaching on angels, take a look at Catholic Online. It can be a little technical but is also an excellent example of a highly rational post-Enlightenment type of theology.
Angels-Online is a site devoted to contemporary stories about people’s experiences of Angels. Some stories are better than others. However, they attest to the current fascination with Angels as a sign of God’s providence or as benevolent spirits in a world of “spirituality” without religion.
The persistence of Angels in people who adhere to religion or who embrace its early earth related forms is a sign of something deeper. People perceive activity in a realm beyond immediate physical reality. If we take a closer look at non-industrialized “primitive” people, as studied by anthropologists, we see that most everything in everyday life is explained in terms of spirits. This notion that the spiritual realm is the true realm is widespread throughout world religions, including Christianity.
The belief in Guardian Angels is a belief in God’s individual care and concern for all of us. For all of us post-moderns stuck in the here and now, Angels offer us a reminder. Angels fly because they take themselves lightly.
St. Jerome (331-420) was a man steeped in classical learning who produced the first Latin translation of the Bible. His feast day is September 30. Leslie J. Hoppe, OFM, in his article on St. Jerome, “The Perils of a Bible Translator,” shows that this vocation is not for the faint of heart.
In the first place, understanding and translating the scriptures requires a secular knowledge of languages, history, and culture that can challenge faith. St. Jerome had a nightmare in which he came before Christ on Judgment Day and was found not to be a Christian but a Ciceronian. (This was a nightmare that became a reality for centuries of Christian students who had to master Classical Ciceronian Latin.)
Sometimes the translator or the Christian scholar finds things that might be better left alone. For example, what if some of the books appear to not be part of the original collection?
Today we often get upset if a translator changes the phrasing of passages which we love. When St. Jerome came out with his translation in the everyday language of the people, enough of them got so upset that there were riots in Tripoli. St. Augustine and other major teachers were very critical.
It is all very modern if it weren’t so ancient.
Portraying St. Jerome with a lion appears to have come from a medieval legend in with the saint pulls the thorn out of the paw of a lion and lives to tell the tale. Even if it is not true, it presents a very good picture of what it means to be a scripture scholar and translator.
Today, October 1, is the feast of St. Thérèse of Lisieux, the Little Flower. This is a picture of her as a child.
As faithful readers will recall, St. Thérèse is one of my favorite saints. I have already written about her (see my post for September 4, 2007, Triumph of the Lowly) and will not go into great detail here. Suffice it to say that in her short 24 years, she gave to the church a great gift, the Little Way. She delighted in the small things of life and determined that her calling was to love God in all His creatures and in all of creation. Although she entered a convent at the age of 15 and died there at 24, her writings have reached beyond the convent walls and touched people great and small since her death from tuberculosis in 1897.
Her Little Way to holiness is one to which all of us are called. It consists of doing the everyday things in “mindful” ways, paying attention and acting in love as we go about our everyday routines.
As she said, “I am a very little soul, who can offer only very little things to the Lord.”
In another place she wrote,”Love proves itself by deeds, so how am I to show my love? Great deeds are forbidden me. The only way I can prove my love is by scattering flowers and these flowers are every little sacrifice, every glance and word, and the doing of the least actions for love.”
As she neared her death, in the midst of a great time of personal spiritual darkness, she assured her sisters, “I will spend my Heaven doing good on earth,” and, ”After my death I will let fall a shower of roses.”
When she overheard two of the other nuns wondering what would ever be said about her at her funeral, since she was so young and had really not done anything of note in her life, she was delighted. She had never wanted to be noticed as any different than the other sisters which whom she lived. Yet within just a few years of her death, her autobiography and other writings were being translated into all the major languages of the world. Her Little Way influenced theologians, popes, bishops, priests, and thousands of others both inside and outside the Church. In recognition of the depth of her contribution to the Church, Pope John Paul II, named her a Doctor of the Church in 1997.
For a more complete biographies, see:
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